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Gerry Cox: Why aren't we up for the Cup?

4:25pm Thursday, 7th January 2010

The FA Cup has lost its sheen, we are told by the pessimists, and the wide open spaces in the stands at Wigan, Bolton and Middlesbrough do not offer much evidence to the contrary. Have we simply fallen out of love with the oldest and most romantic of cup competitions, with the Wembley final that was once the pinnacle of the domestic game?

Are we so hypnotised by the hype of the Premier League and the Champions League that we no longer know or care about anything outside of those heavily promoted televised competitions? Or is it simply that in this tight financial climate, fans can no longer afford to go to any matches outside of their season ticket allowances, especially if they expect to be short-changed by managers who put out weakened sides, thus showing their contempt for the cup and the paying public? The fact is that all of these elements come into play, both in the expectations surrounding the FA Cup and what happens on Saturday afternoons - and mornings, evenings, Sundays, Mondays and even Fridays!

Two dates used to stand out in the English football calendar above all others - the third round of the FA Cup, when David gets his chance against Goliath, and the FA Cup final itself. There was a time not so long ago when Cup Final day was a annual national event, one of the few games to be televised live (and on both BBC and ITV), with a huge buildup in newspapers and on television.

That has largely been eclipsed by the big England games, the latter stages of the Champions League, and of course the Premier League's Big Four battles.

Every week is Super Sunday, it seems, even if the game is not Manchester United against Chelsea but instead Wigan versus Hull, with no undue disrespect to those two sides. Even though Roberto Martinez is trying to invest the Latics with more Latin flair and Phil Brown has done wonders at Hull, neither man would argue that this is a match the neutral would queue round the block for. So when they meet in the FA Cup, when season ticket-holders have to shell out extra for admission, the surprise should not be that the attendance is only 5,335 but that it is so much higher when they meet in the Premier League - after all, Martinez may remember playing in front of a paltry 3887 in the corresponding match a decade ago, when both teams were in the bottom tier of the Football League. Neither is a primarily football town, both being more famous for rugby league than the round ball game, and they do not have the traditions of say Manchester United, Chelsea or Tottenham, who all boasted full houses (or close enough) for their third-round ties.

I know that Spurs were flexible in their ticketing policy (because my children were able to get some of the best seats in the house at cut-price rates) but even if some season ticket-holders did not go, the full house showed great demand for tickets, even for the visit of lowly Peterborough. The FA made the point that average attendances across the third round were up for the third year running, suggesting it is not all doom and gloom.

So perhaps the competition is not the problem, but our approach to it, and I include the media, of which I am part, in this. We give so much coverage to the upper echelons of the Premier and Champions League that there is not much space left for anything else, and jaded fans think along the same lines.

Yet my kids, and generations of starry-eyed schoolboys before them, dream of playing in the FA Cup final at Wembley, not doing a job over 38 games or going through the motions in soulless dead-rubbers of Champions League group games.

As Terry Venables said to me the other day, 'I don't remember kids getting misty-eyed at the thought of winning the league - it was all about the FA Cup final.'

And if you need proof of where those dreams come true, think about those players who have become household names on the back of cup upsets. Who, among those who were lucky enough to see them, can forget the goals of Ronnie Radford, Tim Buzaglo or Matt Hanlon in the great giant-killings, or indeed the great FA Cup final goals of Ricky Villa, Keith Houchen or Steven Gerrard?

Ask Gerrard, who has been there and done it what the FA Cup means and he will tell you it means everything - and we forget that at our peril.

Gerry Cox is one of England's leading football writers and former Chairman of the Football Writers' Association. He has covered well over 1000 matches including four World Cups and four European Championships. He currently runs the Hayters agency and writes for the Daily and Sunday Telegraph.

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